Users of JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify leaked thousands of sensitive secrets, including credentials and private keys, WatchTowr warns.
WatchTowr’s latest research reveals massive leaks of passwords, secrets, and keys across developer formatting platforms like JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify. Despite past incidents, exposed credentials remain rampant, sometimes even for critical systems. WatchTowr researchers highlight how easily sensitive data is shared publicly, underscoring persistent security negligence.
“Iterating through JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify, we captured a dataset of 80,000+ saved pieces of JSON – and then parsed this dataset (using internal apparatus) to identify secrets, credentials, keys, and other types of data with acronyms beginning with P (such as PII).” reads the report published by WatchTowr.
Researchers uncovered thousands of leaked secrets, including AD credentials, cloud keys, private keys, API tokens, full API data, SSH recordings, and even a full AWS Secrets Manager export, on public code-formatting sites. The leaks affected critical sectors such as government, finance, healthcare, telecoms, and CNI, underscoring how easily major organizations expose sensitive data.
Researchers examined the “Save” and “Recent Links” features on popular code‑formatter sites JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify, discovering that users unknowingly exposed their pasted content publicly through predictable, browsable URLs. By scraping these legitimate pages and IDs, the researchers recovered 80,000+ uploads, years of historical data, and over 5GB of content. The investigation confirmed widespread leakage of sensitive information due to users saving secrets on these platforms without realizing the data became publicly accessible.
WatchTowr warned organizations and CERTs for months about massive data leaks from code‑formatter platforms, but few responded. The recovered data included sensitive material from major sectors. Examples included encrypted Jenkins secrets tied to MITRE due to a student mishandling exports; a government PowerShell setup script revealing internal configurations; and a data‑lake technology vendor leaking plain credentials for Docker, JFrog, Grafana, and databases. The findings show widespread, high‑risk exposure caused by users unknowingly saving sensitive data on public formatter sites.
WatchTowr’s research found widespread exposure of highly sensitive data on code-formatting platforms. They discovered production KYC data from a bank, GitHub tokens from a major consultancy, and Active Directory credentials from an MSSP, including those tied to a U.S. bank. Tests confirmed attackers were already scraping these platforms for secrets. The study highlights the dangers of pasting sensitive credentials online and emphasizes proactive threat intelligence and exposure management.
“For those who have already begun writing vicious tweets and emails – today’s publishing of this research has not increased the risk attached to the already existing exposure of this sensitive information in the reviewed platform.” WatchTowr concludes. “Mostly because someone is already exploiting it, and this is all really, really stupid. We don’t need more AI-driven agentic agent platforms; we need fewer critical organizations pasting credentials into random websites.”
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Pierluigi Paganini
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, JSONFormatter)
